Quotes About Regret

Regret is not an apology. I regret that I ran the stop sign, right, but, yeah, I'm not sorry for what I speaking. I regret that because I got a ticket. You can regret things and still not be sorry for them.

I rise today with no small measure of regret, regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics, regret because of the indecency of our discourse.

Let me tell you a few things about regret...There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can't build on it it's only good for wallowing in.

I never regret anything and I don't believe in regret. I think it's just a big time-waster.

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

I tried. I tried to burn that memory of my regret. But I wasn’t dead yet, I was just on my way to dying, and it’s harder to burn memories when you’ve still got life left. When you’re alive you have to learn how to live with things like regret.

Dana Carvey is hilarious. He's a really, really funny, talented guy. You know, I can't think of anything I've ever done that I regret doing, and I certainly don't regret doing Master Of Disguise, because I got to hang around Dana.

I don't regret my past, I just regret the time I've wasted on the wrong people.

You will regret many things in life but you will never regret being too kind or too fair.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

Using the stratagem of defining character by what changes and what remains the same, the one constant always seems to be regret. We are defined by the objects of our regret.

I don't think anybody should regret the choices they made in their twenties.

I don't regret anything.

I wouldn't waste a day, not an hour, not a moment. Take what you want and damn caution. Live, enjoy. Feed ravenously. Or the biggest regret you'll have at the end of your life is wasted time.

I do not regret the folly of my youth, but the timidity.

Try to live your life in a way that you will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and timidity.

I don't regret the decision to retire. My body was losing its edge. I was taking longer to recover from injuries. You have to get out at some point.

Failure is never quite so frightening as regret.

If you do not master the art of self discipline- you will succumb to the emotions and reality of regret.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

Huizi would say, never look back to the past. Never regret. Even if there is emptiness ahead, never look back.

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.

And it's a necessity [for journalists] to pretend to be competent on every subject, some of which they really do not understand. They are under that necessity, I regret; I'm sorry for them. But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.

I think that the whole idea of ‘no regrets’ was always a silly idea to me, because of course I regret all the places I went wrong, but that’s what creating anything, and being human, is all about. Of course if I could go back and knew what I know now, I absolutely would do it differently, I’d do it the right way, but part of being human is that we can’t go back, we can only hope that if we come across that moment again, we’ll do it the right way.

Regret isn't good. Every decision one makes in life is made for a reason or another. Whenever something bad happens, I go, 'This is happening for a reason', or, 'This is going to teach me something'.

Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions.

One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not being able to express it, is better than all the fluency and flippancy in the world.

In the town of broken dreams the streets are filled with regret, maybe down in lonesome town I can learn to forget.

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on.

I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

Those allies who failed to join us will regret it. They're making a mistake.

Of my four marriages, the one to Bob Levitt is the only one I don't regret

I certainly don't regret my experiences because without them, I couldn't imagine who or where I would be today. Life is an amazing gift to those who have overcome great obstacles, and attitude is everything!

Regret and fear are twin thieves that rob us of today.

Do I regret taking the company public? Yes and no. Yes, because it put us under enormous pressure for a young company to go public at that point in its history, something you never could have done in the old days.

I apologize to the women I’ve hurt. I deeply regret what I did and know that it has forever impacted all of our lives.

Every gulp of air that goes out in a cause other than the cause of Allah will turn to sorrow and regret on the Day of Judgement.

I regret that there aren't more short stories in other magazines. But in a certain way, I think the disappearance of the short-story template from everyone's head can be freeing. Partly because there's no mass market for stories, the form is up for grabs. It can be many, many things. So the anthology is very much intended for students, but I think we're all in the position of writing students now. Very few people are going around with a day-to-day engagement with the short story.

I'm very versatile and there's nothing I really regret in my life. I'm excited with who I am and I'm just going to keep riding the wave.

Mistakes are a drag, because you get in the area of regret and self-pity.

Do you lend books and DVDs to people? If so, don't you always regret it? All my life I have forced books on to people who have subsequently forgotten all about it. Meanwhile, on my shelves sit many orphaned books loaned to me over the years by trusting, innocent souls - some as long ago as the Seventies.

I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing.

. . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

I regret things all the time. I've never regretted not saying something. I've only regretted saying something.

The biggest regret? This may be one of those years I have no regrets.